The Severed Man

by George Mann

  ‘Honoré! You can’t do that! You can’t just freak out like that and then say nothing. Not here. Not in this horrible house.’ She sounded like she was about to explode with frustration.

  Honoré stepped forward and placed a hand on her arm. His face was still shrouded in the darkness. ‘We’re okay, Emily. Everything’s okay. Let’s get this over with and get out of here as soon as we can.’ He stepped back and moved away, his feet crunching on the rubbish that littered the floor all around them.

  A moment later, Emily heard the sound of his boots echoing on the wooden staircase as he made his way up to the next floor.

  She was alone in the darkness again. Thoughts began to spiral through her mind. She could see things coming out of the gloom.

  The Devil was there in all his terrible regalia, taunting her, his red eyes burning out of the blackness. Like the image on the Tarot card, he sat atop a marble pillar, his hoofed foot clacking against its smoothly-polished surface as he impatiently tapped out a rhythm like a tortured, mesmerising heartbeat. He was watching her, waiting for her to make a move. Emily whimpered and shook her head, closing her eyes, willing the image to disappear.

  For a moment, everything was darkness once again.

  Then the face of the severed man erupted out of nowhere, feverish, silently imploring her, begging her to carry out some dreadful task.

  She screamed and ran from the room, calling for Lechasseur, scrabbling awkwardly in the darkness for the staircase. In seconds, Honoré was by her side, ready for whatever had scared her.

  ‘What is it? Where?’ He was frantic, fired up with adrenaline and concern.

  Emily grabbed for him in the dark until she caught his arm. She pulled him close, holding him quietly for a moment. When she spoke, it was barely a whisper.

  ‘It’s this house. Something horrific happened here, Honoré, something truly, truly awful. The building’s full of terror.’

  ‘I know.’ He paused for a moment, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders. ‘I’ve just found what we were looking for. I think you’d better come take a look.’

  Cautiously, they made their way up the staircase, Honoré leading Emily by the hand, the steps creaking loudly beneath their weight. When they reached the top, Lechasseur came to rest on the small landing and turned towards her. ‘Are you up to this?’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘It’s... not what I was expecting. The body’s gone. But there’s something else, something that makes me think that we were on the right tracks when we said we thought the murders had some sort of connection to time.’

  ‘What?’

  Honoré reached out and opened the door behind her, which Emily had hardly even noticed in the dark.

  ‘Take a look.’

  She stepped inside. And gasped.

  The room was full of clocks.

  They were everywhere, covering every surface, filling every single space on every wall. Each of them was different from the others; some small and ornate in gold or silver casings, some as large as grandfather clocks, exquisitely carved out of the finest mahogany. Pocket watches hung from the ceiling like tiny, sparkling stars, dangling on their chains to create a varied and strangely beautiful timescape suspended above the entire room. Carriage clocks sat proudly on the naked floorboards amongst piles of paper and torn bedclothes.

  It was the sound that got to Emily first, however; the aural assault of so many timepieces ticking together in such a tiny space; all out of sync with one another, all attempting to measure time in a manner slightly at odds with their counterparts. It was as if the whole of history was present in this little room, every second being counted over and over again ad infinitum; a war of time fought out in an East End flat in Victorian London.

  Emily wanted to press her hands to her ears and make it all stop. The ticking was like a strange sort of music, an out-of-step dance, and in her mind’s eye she could see the image of the Devil again, tapping his foot to the strangely rhythmic beating of the clocks, searching through the time zones with his piercing red eyes, looking for paths amongst the chaos.

  And as if that wasn’t enough, Emily noted, there was a large, corpse-sized space amongst the clocks on the floor; a space spattered with blood and gore; the results of whatever had happened to the occupier of this extraordinary, terrifying room. A number of the artefacts on the floor had apparently been overturned or smashed in the fight.

  Emily turned back to Lechasseur, who was standing in the doorway behind her.

  ‘Honoré. What are you thinking?’

  ‘That something very strange and very horrible is going on here.’

  Emily shivered. ‘I figured that much out myself.’

  Honoré edged a little further into the room and reached out, plucking something from within the mechanism of one of the taller grandfather clocks that stood against the wall to her left. He held it up for Emily to see in the dim light.

  A Tarot card. She took it from him and examined it more closely. It was identical to the one she had seen in Newman’s office just a few hours earlier. She handed it back to Honoré, who caught her eye, before slipping it into his pocket.

  ‘So, Emily, want to tell me what’s going on?’

  She looked at him, stunned for a moment. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean the thing with you and this Devil card. I saw the reaction you had to it in Newman’s office. And then there was that thing with the stagecoach that nearly bowled us over when we arrived.’ He looked confused, and more than a little frustrated. ‘What is it that you’re not telling me? What do you know about what’s going on?’

  ‘That’s just it! I don’t know anything! I just keep seeing these horrible pictures of the Devil, and they terrify me, Honoré, really, really terrify me.’ He could see in the darkness that she had started to cry. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I keep having these dreams, these visions of the Devil, sitting on top of a marble pillar like the one in the picture. Every time I close my eyes, I can see him looking back at me, staring right at me, as if he’s looking for something or searching me out in the darkness. It’s like I’m lost and he’s trying to find me. And the thing is, I don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore!’ At this, she broke down into sobs and covered her face with her hands, trying to stem the flow of tears. Lechasseur stepped towards her, put his arm around her shoulders and held her tightly.

  ‘It’s all right Emily. You’re just tired, that’s all. I guess neither of us has had much sleep recently, and all these horrible events are finally starting to get to you. It’s just your mind playing tricks on you, same thing that’s been happening to me.’

  Emily pushed back from him, suddenly hesitant. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, dreams and stuff. Seeing things in the darkness. It’s just your head’s way of telling you to slow down, to take a rest. We’ve been through a lot in the last couple of days, that’s all.’

  ‘Is that what happened downstairs – seeing things in the darkness?’

  Honoré shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ He turned to walk away, heading out of the room.

  Emily tried to catch him. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Tell me, Honoré. I’m not a child.’

  He stopped and looked back at her, plainly unsure whether to say anything or not.

  ‘Honoré...’

  ‘Okay.’ He levelled his gaze on her. ‘When I looked at you, you were standing there in the corner, staring right back at me.’

  ‘And...?’

  ‘And you had a Devil’s head.’ A pause. ‘Now come on, let’s get out of this godforsaken place and find somewhere quiet to get some rest.’

  Emily, without saying another word, followed him down the rickety staircase and carefully around the piles of rubbish and grime towards the blinding daylight out
side.

  [1] See The Cabinet of Light.

  Blood, Death And Mortar

  He was standing behind a low wall, watching, waiting.

  Honoré could hear his own breath whistling out between his pursed lips as he attempted to ignore the cold. In the distance, he could hear the sound of gunfire; shells howling through the still air, explosions creating pock-marks in the surface of the world, throwing clods of dirt and bits of men up into the air like so many scattered seeds on the wind.

  He gripped his rifle and waited. Beside him, one of his fellow soldiers was lighting up a cigarette, his back placed precariously to the wall. Honoré had seen this before; a bullet in the back of the head when you weren’t looking. That’s what became of careless men in this war. The enemy didn’t think twice about shooting you in the back.

  Still, one shell in the wrong place and they’d all be swimming in dirt and blood anyhow.

  He glanced around warily. The farmhouse was a shattered ruin. It loomed behind them, casting wide, sweeping shadows in the bright sunlight and serving as a cover against the rapid enemy fire. Lechasseur supposed that it must have been destroyed some time in the recent past, at least since the onset of the war, although there was no obvious evidence of any blast or explosion. Just the broken, crumbled remains of the old stone house and the remnants of a barn that had collapsed in on itself and was now completely useless to them, even as cover.

  Honoré heard a sudden, high-pitched wail as a shell screamed overhead, bursting into light and flame where it touched the ground just a few hundred yards behind them. He looked around at his fellows to see most of them on the floor, rifles by their sides, sighing in relief that the enemy bomb had sailed so easily overhead.

  All of them knew the dark death that awaited them, sometime in this dismal war, and all of them wanted to cheat it for as long as they humanly could.

  Honoré looked out over the fields around the farm. Bizarrely, everything looked calm. If he concentrated, he could shut out the sounds of the shells and the screams and just see the rolling hills in the distance, the beautiful and unspoiled Normandy countryside. Then his eyes came to rest on the enemy stronghold in the neighbouring farm, and reality came flooding back to him with a start.

  The encampment had been fenced off with a tangled web of barbed wire, and the ground churned into a sodden mess by the wheels of the supply vehicles. Gun emplacements lined the edges of the camp, and Honoré could see figures moving about like tiny ants. Every few minutes, one of the artillery guns would go off and another shell would fly howling overhead.

  He crouched down, resting the barrel of his rifle against the wall for a moment. The other men had returned to their positions and were joking with each other about another near miss. It was their way of trying to deal with the constant threat of death, but Lechasseur found it difficult to join in. To him, death was no laughing matter. For weeks, he’d been seeing ghosts wandering about on the battlefields; the dead come back to life to stalk the living.

  He’d already decided he was going crazy; or, at least, that the war was getting to him in ways he hadn’t expected, starting to inspire hallucinations and moments of bizarre lucidity in which he was sure he was seeing what was really there... only to decide, moments later, that it had all been a figment of his vivid imagination.

  He thought back to the last time it had happened, just a couple of days before.

  It was early in the morning, and most of the other men were just beginning to stir, packing up their sleeping bags in the old farmhouse and trying to manufacture some form of breakfast from the measly rations they had left at the bottom of their packs. Lechasseur had been on watch for a few hours, hidden in the foliage on the outskirts of their encampment. It had been a quiet night, with little enemy activity, and he had allowed himself to relax, resting his rifle alongside him in the bushes. The sun was just beginning to filter in from the East, swirling away the light mist that had settled over the fields during the night like some ethereal blanket. He glanced up momentarily, just to scan the area before beginning preparations to return to camp. And that’s when he saw them.

  Thousands of people, all walking towards him out of the mist, marching ominously and silently towards something he couldn’t see. It was as if the entire enemy army had just mobilised and appeared in front of him in the time it had taken him to blink and look away.

  He frowned and scrabbled to reclaim his rifle, clambering to his knees in the dirt. He’d have to make a run for it, inform the others to pull back before the enemy stormed the camp. He had no idea how so many people could have got so close without him noticing.

  He looked back. The figures were drawing closer now, and he could see some of their faces. They looked like civilians. But the strangest thing was what was going on in the spaces between them. It was as if the mist had rolled in with the tides of people, as if the rows and rows of these strange apparitions were surrounded by some sort of distortion, some sort of wave of mist that warped his view of them and caused him to feel dizzy and disorientated.

  And, most bizarrely of all, one of the figures at the head of the procession appeared to be female and wearing a pair of pink, silken pyjamas. The nightclothes fluttered around her body, revealing stretches of pale leg and the shape of her hips and breasts... But the figure bore the head of a horned devil, not that of a human being.

  He raised his rifle and took a shot.

  The rows of people continued to march on regardless, not even turning to look.

  He aimed again, drawing a bead on the strange devil creature.

  His shot seemed to pass right through it, as if it wasn’t really there. The figure came to a halt. For a moment, it stood there in the misty field, whilst the press of people just seemed to swarm around it, unperturbed. Then it turned and looked directly at him, it eyes glowing a glassy, fiery red.

  Lechasseur didn’t hesitate a moment longer. He turned and ran, leaving his rifle lying on the ground amongst the fallen leaves, and didn’t stop running until he’d cleared the camp and was standing in the middle of a field alone, panting at the empty sky.

  Somewhere in the distance he heard the howl of an animal, and wondered if it was actually something else entirely...

  Honoré woke in a cold sweat.

  He sat bolt upright on the bed, looking around in the dark. Emily was still asleep on the other side of the room, curled up on her tiny bunk. The room stank of stale sweat and urine.

  He rubbed his face with his hands. He had to do something about these dreams; they were starting to affect his ability to keep his mind on the job. Not only that, but he was sure they were starting to impact upon his relationship with Emily. Something was going on behind the scenes, and he was sure it had a lot to do with the images that kept cropping up in his nightmares.

  But there was more than that, too. Now he was beginning to doubt the veracity of his own memory. What was real and what was not? He remembered clearly the moment in Normandy when he had seen all those walking, spectral figures, and at the time had put it down to sheer fatigue and a deep-seated weariness with the War. Later, after discovering his bizarre sensitivity to time, he had looked back on a number of oddities from his past in a new light, and had seen them in the context of his new life. The ‘ghosts’ had probably been figures from different time zones, all interweaving with one another, crossing each other’s paths, centuries apart. It had simply been his unfiltered mind that had allowed him to see it all at once, provided him with a rare ‘overview’ of time; and it had nearly driven him insane in the process.

  He had learned to live with these surrealistic visions by simply blanking them out, shutting out the strange real-world he could see and forcing himself to lead what he figured was a ‘normal’ life. After a while it had become a reflex, a lowering of the shades to keep out the nightmares on the other side of the window. Until he had gone and gotten himself mixed up in the �
��Emily Blandish’ affair, that is...

  He tried to cast his mind back to that time on the embankment in Normandy. Now, in the cold light of day, he couldn’t recall seeing the Emily/Devil figure amongst the others in the field, nor remember actually shooting at any of the people in the strange, ethereal crowd. Was that a figment of his dream, or was there something far more sinister going on, something that was starting to draw elements from his past further and further into the present day? Had all this been working away in the background for years, toiling like some devilish mechanism that was drawing, patiently, towards some terrible and unexpected endgame? If so, it looked like things were going to come to a head soon enough. Honoré could feel the tension like a palpable, electric field in the air, and it was starting to get to him, to wear him down.

  He felt lost, isolated, and aware that the one person he could talk to about all this was the one person he needed to talk about. The irony almost made him laugh out loud.

  Honoré climbed off the bed and found his coat and boots in the half-light. Emily stirred briefly on the nearby bunk, but he froze in the doorway, and after a moment she rolled over and continued to doze. She looked peaceful lying there, resting. Honoré felt guilty leaving her by herself, but he needed to get some air. Alone.

  With one last glance at Emily, he slipped out of the door to their room, stepped quietly onto the landing of the boarding house and then onwards down the stairs and away.

  Outside, the night was like a purple stain; the sky was under-lit by a brilliant wash of bronzes and deep reds. Yellow fog curled around every corner, hugging the ground and clinging to the air like some sort of vaporous, airborne leech.

  Honoré pulled his coat tight around himself and tried to get his bearings, looking around for a building or sign he could easily place. He wanted to be back before Emily woke, and the thought of getting lost in the soupy fog was not at all appealing. He glanced up and down the street, looking to see if there was anybody else about. The place seemed deserted.